Charley's Electric Bluegrass Acid Trip
Kamala and I leave El Paso with the intention of going to northern New Mexico, but at the last minute we hear about Bluegrass Festival in Weed, New Mexico up in the cool Sacramento Mountains. We've enjoyed these all day events before so we detour and head out to Weed, a thriving little community of about 20 houses (maybe), a couple of churches, a store and gas station, and a school. We arrive about 30 minutes early and right away the scene turns a bit surrealistic as the parking attendant, a big gal in a day-glow vest is mounted on a great big horse. She bends down and instructs us to park..."Over yonder on the hill." And so we do and are met almost instantly by a couple of smiling guys, an old man and a teenage boy, wearing maroon Weed Bluegrass Festival T-shirts and driving a golf cart. "Ya want a ride over to the Gym?" they enthusiastically offer. Kamala and I look across the street at a large building which is about 200 yards away and, obviously the only place in the whole town big enough for this kind of shindig. Strange, I mean, it's so close, but, hey the natives are very friendly and, what the hell, we haven't ridden in a golf cart recently so we jump on. "Wheeeee!"
There are only a few people there as we pay and get our wrist bands. We find a good seat about half way back and on the side, I'm beginning to feel this buzz which I attribute to the fresh mountain air, but as I study the people coming in the I'm beginning to sense some sort of "Distorted Reality". Something is off. There are a few young people, but the crowd is definitely older. I remember, at one time, thinking, 'This will be considered a successful festival if no one breaks a hip.' The crowd seems to be a mixture of local families, mostly cowboy, old geezers down from their isolated mountain cabins, and affluent tourists. I'm not sure which category we fit; tourist I guess, but we're sure as hell not affluent.
The music starts and it is good. However, I keep getting drawn back to the crowd as it enters, mills around, greets one another and gossips. The chatter and the mood seems perfectly normal and yet the crowd? Well, it's strange. The acid must be kicking in now because the crowd is full of all these caricatures. Like the short, clean cut, gentleman with a black New York T-shirt that has a nose and ears that would be big on a man 3 times his size, or the crooked lady that had an extreme lean to one side when she walked, or the old gal with dark, penciled in eyebrows, or an older women dressed in a black shirt, black pants and new cowboy boots that seemed to lean and lurch herself forward in stumbling sort of gait that I continually feared she would go head first into the crowd or a wall, or the cowboy dandy that was all dressed up with a long sleeve shirt and a bandana around his neck in the hot weather (even old farts sometimes have to sacrifice comfort for 'cool'). Most people seemed to have some sort of exaggerated quality about their body, hair style or of mode of dress.
'Wow, this acid is some bad shit,' I think, 'I wonder what I look like?' And then I remember...'This ain't the 60's and I don't do that stuff no more. (tired of waking up on the floor).'
So I wonder, 'If I haven't done any drugs, nope, not even alcohol, what's going on with the crowd? Is it just that as we get older our "weirdness" both physical and behavioral become more accented? Oh my God, I wonder what mine are?'
Well the music was good, and the weird people? Well, I just went with it and rather enjoyed the strangeness. We had a real enjoyable time, but I wasn't able to look in a mirror for about 3 days for fear of what I might see.
